After having nailed the hardware, design and pricing of smartphones, the app ecosystem is the only major thing Microsoft has to sort out for the Windows Phone platform.

No surprises then, that the company regularly provides updates on how the applications are coming along. Well, Joe Belfiore is usually the lone ranger here, tweeting and talking about upcoming releases, and he has some more good news on the matter.

In a recent tweet, he confirmed that updates to the Skype and Facebook apps are almost ready, along with a few new applications for the platform:

One can just hope that these are some significant updates that bring new features, including options exclusive to Windows Phone 8.1. Both Skype and Facebook on the platform need a lot of feature and performance improvements.

In fact, one might even make a case for complete rewrites of these apps, similar to how the Skype app on iOS was redesigned from the ground up.